Shane
Being a demi-God is FREE, if you are a PS Vita owner.
Like a science project it is up to you make the planet thrive whilst maintaining a fragile balance between the life and death of your world.
Ecolibrium is a free download from Sony for the PS Vita from the PSN. It’s a simulator to the point where no title has ever gone before.
After a short customization Menu and a brief but necessary tutorial an empty, vast world lies in front of you.
You now must commit life unto it by way of vegetation and animals.
Both plant and creature life are unique to the game and you need to obtain the right balance in order for your Eco system to thrive.
It’s not as easy as you would think.
You need to be methodical in your creature selections, too many carnivores will decimate the herbivore population and too many plant munchers will take out the vegetation.
Even the plant life can cause havoc. Not enough moisture or too much moisture will determine if your Planet thrives or dies. Some plants give oxygen in abundance, others counteract the invisible gas. Use plantation to generate much needed minerals, collect Artefacts to maintain the life you have created.
There are all manner
of creatures available, looking like a mash-up of Dinosaurs fused with modern day animals. From the fierce meat eating hunters through to herding fauna eating beasts and not forgetting; airborne predators.
If your conditions are right the populous will reproduce themselves, if it’s not, they simply become extinct.
You constantly need to monitor your environment, and make use of diffusers and minerals if you have them to keep the utopian order.
Every organic and even in-organic item in the game causes an effect and it is a case of having the right number of them to ensure everything goes to plan.
All of this is governed by a Menu Hub or Laboratory, where Energy and Ecopints become extremely valuable.
Within your Lab is where the Creature and Plant selection is, each with their own individual Wiki which details not only their mannerisms, characteristics and so forth but also detailing what they bring in or can influence your environment with. So always tread carfefully and don’t just add things into your World sporadically. As with the real world, every action has a consequence and when a new addition is added into an already vulnerable environment the affect can not only be random but also detrimental.
You use Ecopoints to acquire newer or more species of animal and plant life. There are gained as you build your World, but you also need to have the required level of energy to add lifeforms that you have already acquired into the fray.
While there is a large handful of differing species available in the game, more can be purchased for real world money via the PSN.
Gameplay allows you to practice in Free Play or undertake various Missions whereby you may have to introduce a new species without disrupting the harmony, culling a rampant species or one in particular requires you to maintain a 98% equilibrium over the course of one game day. The Missions can go from extremely simplistic to extreme difficulty.
Then there’s Natural Disasters, which of course hamper all of the above.
There are also Online
Challenges and Leaderboards. You can also buy other wise locked creatures and fauna from the in-game Menu via the PSN.
If you find that one species is don’t too well and running rampant in population numbers or exile them into the wastelands of your World. Exiling them doesn’t always have the desired effect though, as some species can thrive in harsher environments. That said, other Vita equipped Ecolibriumists can use the GPS function in the game, doubled with the near feature of the Vita to snap up your unwanteds. You can also share your creations this way aswell.
Ecolibrium is a game of strategy, balance and patience.
Graphically amazing, especially for a title that is this open world.
You will either become obsessed with Ecolibrium or play it for a few hours and move on.
Myself, after planting a few scraggly trees and fungus vegetation, introducing a series of both Herbivores and Carnivores and unsuccessfully getting them to reproduce, and investing well over a week into it, I had to move on.
Unique and definitely in a click of its own, give Ecolibrium a go. It’s a rare opportunity to have a title this epic as a freebie for Vita owners.
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Genre: Simulation
Platform: Playstation Vita
Publisher: SCEE
No. of Players: 1 + Online Features
